Those pouting spooks and their MSM friends have, in the opinion of this writer, gone too far this time. They’ve gotten carried away by breathing in too much of the oxygen-deprived atmosphere of high-mindedness prevailing within their rarified liberal elite circles, and have lost all touch with reality, specifically the reality of what normal people are going to think of all the recent “Gotcha! You are sooo mean to the poor widdle terrorists” stories.

ABC news informs the world, sternly wagging its finger under the nose of the Bush Administration, that though the wounded-in-capture

Abu Zubaydah was given proper care… Once healthy, he was slapped, grabbed, made to stand long hours in a cold cell, and finally handcuffed and strapped feet up to a water board until after 0.31 seconds he begged for mercy and began to cooperate.

Can you imagine? Not only grabbed, but actually slapped! And then the poor lamb had his face immersed in water for a soul-shattering 31 seconds before this brave soldier of the Prophet crumbled and began singing like a canary.

Face it, gentlemen. Abu Zubaydah was not really some bird-watching tourist erroneously scooped up in a random police sweep. He was a very major figure in Al Qaeda, its chief of military operations and its chief recruiter. Infoplease says:

Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Husayn Abu Zubaydah is a Palestinian long believed to be one of Osama bin Laden’s top lieutenants. Experts think Abu Zubaydah became al-Qaeda’s chief of military operations after Muhammed Atef was killed in a U.S. bombing raid on Afghanistan in Nov. 2001. Early in 2002, intelligence experts said Abu Zubaydah was reorganizing the far-flung remnants of the al-Qaeda network to plan further terrorist actions. He is suspected of helping plan a wave of incidents that was to have taken place after Sept. 11, 2001, including attacks on the American embassies in Paris and Sarajevo.

Abu Zubaydah has a long history of involvement with al-Qaeda. In 1999, a Jordanian military court sentenced Abu Zubaydah in absentia to death for plotting to attack tourist sites in Jordan around the millennium.

Abu Zubaydah also organized terrorist attacks on the millennium celebrations in the Los Angeles in Dec. 1999, according Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian convicted of involvement in that plan. During his trial Ressam also said Abu Zubaydah directed Afghan terrorist camps and recruitment for al-Qaeda. Ressam indicated that Abu Zubaydah told him to obtain Canadian passports so others could carry out attacks against the U.S.

There is reason to believe that grabbing Mr. Zubaydah, shaking him, and giving him a good slap, may very well have saved a great many innocent American lives by thwarting a project he had been working on in his spare time, involving the detonation of a dirty bomb somewhere in the United States:

AP 11 Jun 2002:

Jose Padilla, the alleged American al-Qaida operative, became a protege of top Osama bin Laden lieutenant Abu Zubaydah late last year, even as the war on terrorism raged around them in Afghanistan, U.S. officials said.

But Abu Zubaydah fell into U.S. hands in late March, before Padilla could carry out any attacks, officials said. The prisoner became one of several sources of information that led U.S. authorities to Padilla.

While left-wing members of the urban chattering classes may get their knickers in a twist over “secret renditions” and the occasional grabbing and slapping of terrorist fanatics plotting mass-murder attacks on innocent people, ordinary normal Americans are only too well aware that they themselves might just one day happen to be the very same innocent people targeted by these monsters for cruel and untimely death. Most Americans do not live in the same privileged dreamworld as our liberal elite, and consequently do not subscribe to the same kind of ultra-scrupulous moral philosophies dictating that one must love thine enemy and get him an ACLU attorney. Most Americans really wouldn’t mind one tiny bit, if rough men charged with protecting their lives found it desirable to chop the likes of Mr. Zubaydah into a fine minced pate, and proceeded to serve him on toast, if that is what it took to keep innocent people at home safe from Mr. Zubaydah’s friends’ murderous plots.

My guess is that the great majority of Americans are not going to like this kind of leaking, and they are not going to like the leakers or the MSM which irrresponsibly publishes information jeopardizing this country’s efforts in the War on Terror, and that the cries of indignation drawn from the American public by the publication of this improperly disclosed intelligence information, are not going to be cries demanding the heads of leading figures in the Bush Administration or that of the fellow who gave Mr. Zubaydah a good slap. What the American public is really going to want are the heads of the pouting-spook leakers and those of the reporters assisting them.

Ralph Peters writes:

Patriotism? Forget it.

After Watergate, patriotism became an embarrassment among journalists. They’re “citizens of the world.” CNN International has grown so casually anti-American that it rivals the BBC, while much of big media here at home gives terrorist atrocities a pass, while celebrating the slightest errors of our troops with front-page headlines.

ABC News is reporting that

Current and former CIA officers speaking to ABC News on the condition of confidentiality say the United States scrambled to get all the suspects off European soil before Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived there today. The officers say 11 top al Qaeda suspects have now been moved to a new CIA facility in the North African desert.

The disgrunted intelligence officers even disclosed an actual list of 12 high-value targets allegedly held by the CIA, and ABC is reporting it :

Abu Zubaydah: Held first in Thailand then Poland

Abu Faraj al-Libbi: Held in Poland

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Category link to previous and later related articles.

Left-wing author & journalist Robert Dreyfuss published an attack on Porter Goss a few weeks ago (10/Nov/2005) in the liberal American Prospect , which, nonetheless, supplies excellent backgound (and plenty of insider gossip) on the war inside the CIA:

Exactly as intended, Porter Goss has hit the Central Intelligence Agency like a wrecking ball… Since Goss took over, between 30 and 90 senior CIA officials have made their exit, according to various sources, some fleeing into retirement, others taking refuge as consultants. Others, unable to retire, have stayed, but only to mark time at the agency. Morale, already low after several years during which the CIA was accused of a series of intelligence failures related to September 11 and Iraq’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, is now at rock-bottom. The agency’s vaunted Near East Division, in particular, which served as the “pointy end of the spear,” as one CIA veteran put it, in simultaneous wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the “global war on terror,” has been decimated (sic).

CIA doves were accustomed to looking upon themselves as an enlightened guild of mandarins, the permanent professionals who advised unsophisticated and temporarily-elected executive administrations on the realities of international affairs, of how it really was, and on what was done and not done, old boy. The Bush administration was determined to govern, and the willingness of some of its conservatives to challenge the hegemony of entrenched liberal bureaucracies in the State Department and the CIA was revolutionary. Establishment members of the notoriously liberal CIA mandarinate found themselves being ignored by a bunch of arriviste Republicans, and they were absolutely furious. Like many liberal academics, they had resided for so long in a self-reinforcing community of the like-minded, in which their own viewpoint and prejudices flourished unchallenged, that they firmly believed in their own intellectual superiority and privileged access to objective truth. Unwelcome conservative dissent, particularly dissent arriving from positions of superior authority accompanied by demands for re-evaluations of cherished liberal articles of policy faith were perceived as outside pressure tampering with Agency process :

The partisan, pro-Bush nature of the current regime at the CIA was underlined when Goss issued a widely leaked memorandum telling agency employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” adding, “As agency employees we do not identify with, support, or champion opposition to the administration or its policies.”

The import of Goss’ memo to staff was not lost on agency veterans. “The meaning was that from now on, there is only one acceptable view, and that’s the neocon view,” said one. For many it was the final straw, convincing them that there was no hope of salvaging independent analysis.

Goss may have put the final nail in the coffin of an agency whose expertise and analytical skills were cavalierly overridden by a White House obsessed with Saddam Hussein. From 2001 on, its covert operatives and analysts were ignored, pressured, and forced to toe the administration’s line; neoconservative ideologues considered those operatives to be virtually part of the enemy camp. Many of those who remain inside the CIA are distraught, convinced that their work is wasted on an administration that doesn’t want to hear the truth. “How do you think they feel?” asked one recently retired CIA officer with three decades of experience. “They’re watching a ****ing idiotic policy, run by idiots, unfold right before their eyes!”

This outrage at the perceived slighting of professional expertise and interference with analytic process is what has led some very angry CIA officers and analysts to apply their skills and connections as participants in an organized operation aimed at destroying and removing specific adversaries including the Vice President, and at crippling an elected administration.

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Not everyone with a CIA background shares Dreyfuss’ view of the Goss revolution as unmitigated disaster. Melissa Boyle Mahle, a former CIA operations officer and Intelligence author, who has a recently created blog writes:

Goss is doing what George Tenet could not and would not do, shedding the organization of the “old think” that led the Agency into playing it safe in the 1990s. After the Iran-Contra and Ames spying scandals, the Agency lost so much political standing that it began to implode organizationally and philosophically. Afraid to take risks that might offend Washington politicos and European allies after overstepping its legal bounds in the Iran-Contra era, gutted of the clandestine operators who knew how to run secret wars, exhausted from reform whiplash, and demoralized by criticism and poor performance, the CIA simply became unable and unwilling to get down and dirty to do the hard part to fight a real war on terrorism.

The CIA senior leaders today are those who came of age as managers during the 1990s and many unfortunately bring with them the mind-set of caution and political correctness. The culture of the Agency, particularly that of the Directorate of Operations, places a premium on organizational loyalty. The “old boy” network sticks together and resists changes that might alter its collective power and influence. The upheaval at Langley is a direct result of DCI Goss challenging the status quo, breaking some china and hitting the cultural brick wall.

Hat tip to Tom Maguire.

MSM Anti-Bush Administration Intel Operation collaborator Dana Priest, author of the Washington Post’s earlier “secret prisons” CIA leak story, has a new one this morning, based on “new details gleaned from interviews with current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials.”

In other words, leaked by the cabal of disgruntled State Department and Intelligence Community doves, referred to felicitously by William Safire as “a flock of pouting spooks,” who vigorously supported John Kerry in the last election, and who have since been waging an active Intelligence operation seeking to bring down the Bush Administration, whose greatest success, so far, has been achieved in connection with L’Affair Plame by the indictment of one of their key opponents: Vice Presidential Chief of Staff Lewis Libby.

It seems that in May of 2004 the CIA released (those dastards!) a German citizen previously detained for five months, and then had the unmitigated gall to request the German government to cooperate by keeping secret informnation shared in relation to the case. (How dare they!)

Some might consider the release by US authorities to evidence the existence of fair and rational process in the secret US battle against terrorism, of proof that allegations are investigated, and suspects established to be innocent released, but not Dana Priest. To La Priest, the release:

offers a rare study of how pressure on the CIA to apprehend al Qaeda members after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks has led in some instances to detention based on thin or speculative evidence. The case also shows how complicated it can be to correct errors in a system built and operated in secret.

How stupid does Ms. Priest think Washington Post readers are exactly? It would be a lot fairer too, let me suggest, if Priest also operated openly, and told the world just who it is that planted this story, including savory tidbits of inside gossip about “a former Soviet analyst with spiked hair that matched her in-your-face personality who heads the CTC’s al Qaeda unit,” who it is who is recklessly prepared to discredit and compromise US efforts to prevent terrorist attacks on large Western civilian population targets in order to avenge in-house slights, bring down rivals, and gain partisan political advantage.

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Some earlier related posts are linked here.

Scott Johnson of Power-Line quotes Peter Mulherin on the political circumstances of the president’s opponents:

The Democrat Party has just entered the McGovern Zone. The nation is at war against deadly enemies and the Democrats are going into an election committed to capitulation. They are gambling everything on failure in Iraq. If, in six months, successful elections have been held in Iraq and we have begun reducing our troop levels there, only a few hardcore nutjobs will still cling to the idea that Iraq is a hopeless quagmire. That idea is all the Democrats have to offer and when it dies the Democrat Party itself will be teetering on the edge of extinction.

and recommends statesmanship:

After entering the McGovern Zone in 1972, however, the Democrats had a field day courtesy of Watergate in 1974. The recurring CIA leaks, pseudo-scandals and media hostility undermining the Bush administration are also reminiscent of the forces with which Nixon contended following his landslide reelection. Under the circumstances, it seems to me that the statesmanship of President Bush’s Naval Academy speech represents the best course for him to take and to persist in.

We disagree. In political contests, as in war, either you are on the offensive, or you are on the defensive. If President Bush is going to avoid repeating the history of Nixon’s second term, if he is going to avoid being reduced to impotence, and possibly even destroyed, by an endless series of leaks, opportunistic charges, and trumped-up prosecutions, fanned by the opposition media sooner or later successfully into a major scandal, what he needs to do is to pursue not the way of the statesman, but –as we previously suggested– the Chicago Way. What he needs to do is to take to heart the advice provided by Sean Connery’s Jim Malone to Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness in Brian de Palma’s The Untouchables (1987):

Connery: lf you open the ball on these people, you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight until one of you is dead.

Costner: l want to get Capone. l don’t know how.

Connery: Here’s how you get Capone: he pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone. Now, do you want to do that? Are you ready to do that?

The way to avoid being destroyed by leaks and pseudo-scandals in endless succession is to prosecute the leakers, to identify the organized campaign against the administration by disaffected active and retired government employees as the scandal and criminal conspiracy it is, to fight it in the public debate arena, and to identify laws which have been broken and prosecute the guilty parties.

Brendan O’Neill, deputy-editor of spiked, a British online magazine “with the (?) modest (?) ambition of making history as well as reporting it,” and apparently (sort of, kind of) on the political Right, falls into an ecstatic state of higher consciousness at the marvellous complexity of it all, or perhaps he was merely stoned.

The Belgian brunette didn’t only blow up herself in Baghdad – she also blew to bits the various stereotypes of Islamic terrorists…

The life and death of Muriel Degauque should make all sides of the war and terror debate stop and think – about contemporary terrorism, the nature of the Iraqi insurgency, and disaffection among sections of society in the West. So come on then, what was Degauque? An Islamo-fascist, a freedom fighter – or something else?

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O’Neill should have read The Radical Loser by Hans Magnus Enzenberger. Hat tip to Franco Aleman.

Thomas Joscelyn discusses anonymous source spinning of information obtained by the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative captured in March 2002, into firm evidence of the lack of ties between the Iraqi Baathist regime and al Qaeda. Hat tip to John Hinderaker at Power-Line.

Scott Johnson at Power-Line also is investigating another even more important leak by the ( in Safire’s happy phrase) “pouting spooks” actively participating in the onging Anti-Bush Administration Intelligence Operation, describing secret CIA transports of terrorist prisoners. Richard Miniter, author of Disinformation: 22 Media Myths that Undermine the War on Terror and Shadow War: The Untold Story of How President Bush is Winning the War on Terror and Power-Line readers discuss whether the information of the flights was simply gleaned from public records with the addition of a little trade-craft by retired CIA officers (now part of the VIPS cabal):

(Richard Miniter says:)

It turns out that the movements of the CIA aircraft (and virtually all private aircraft) are a matter of public record. All you need is a tail number and you can usually obtain its movements for the past year.

Even without the tail number, you can pore through the records looking for suspicious movements (DC to Kabul to Baku and back, say). The CIA could ask (as can private parties as well) that its leased planes not have its logs publicly reported, but, whether through incompetence or design, they have not. Also, Grey told me, the incorporation records of Aero and other leasing outfits are publicly available. Here again the CIA was sloppy. Apparently many of the people named in those documents overlapped with people named in corporation’s documents, i.e., Joe Blow shows up as the chief executive of several different aircraft companies simultaneously and a Google search strongly suggests that Blow has a CIA connection. Add in some visits to bars frequented by charter pilots and airplane mechanics’ shops, and you have a large chunk of the story — all without a single (actively-serving) CIA leak.

Readers Rich Cox and P.S. Malloy are skeptical, and Malloy argues the fact that it may have been possible to reverse engineer the story using public information does not mean that the information leaked necessarily was obtained from public sources. There is no reason to feel certain that all participants in anti-Bush intel operations are currently retired. It is known, for instance, that CIA officers not-then-retired were leaking information intended to help discredit the aministration’s case against Iraq before the 2003 invasion.

Miniter has a later response.

Jonathan David Carson identifies the natural convergence of the interests of the American Left with those of Islamo-fascism. Even in a case featuring such apparently strong dissimilarities of ideology, what matters more is ancient truism: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

And then came 9/11, and though they were too stunned to realize it at the time, for American liberals, life again had meaning, that is, an enemy of the United States to make excuses for, to protect from conservatives, and in whose image to fashion themselves. Islamofascists would try to drive American troops from the Middle East, and liberals would try to bring them home. Criticism of Islam is illegal under sharia law, and liberals would try to make it impossible here.

Terrorists would seek a repeat of 9/11, and liberals would oppose the Patriot Act. Al Qaeda would use public libraries to avoid detection by Internet sleuths, and liberals would make people crazy with fear that Bush would find out what books they were checking out. Palestinians would blow up pizza parlors, and universities would divest from companies doing business in Israel.

Iran would stone adulterers and homosexuals, and Hollywood would mock uptight Republicans. Islamic immigrants would commit honor killings, and feminists would accuse conservatives of sexism. Saudi Arabia would prohibit Christianity and Judaism, and the ACLU would drive them from public life in the United States. Insurgents would blow up American soldiers as they handed out candy to Iraqi children, and Democratic senators would liken our armed forces to Nazis and communists.

Terrorist sympathizers would concoct American and Israeli atrocities, and the world press would report them. Suicide bombers would infiltrate Iraq through Syria, and liberals would denounce the United States invasion. Muslims would brag about their ancestors, and liberals would denigrate ours. Terrorists would kill the just and the unjust alike, and professors would deconstruct the difference between right and wrong.

Islamicists would burn American flags, and liberals would scoff at flag-wavers. Muslims would claim that the Bible is made up of forgeries, and liberals would engage in Higher Criticism. Baathists would disrupt elections in Iraq, and Democrats would declare ours illegitimate. We would uncover mass graves in Iraq, and liberal Democrats would call for investigations in the United States. Muslims would drive Jews from the Middle East, and liberals would limit their numbers in the academic world with affirmative action.

Islam would spread polygamy, and liberals would undermine the institution of marriage. Zarqawi would bomb crowded mosques, and liberals would accuse conservatives of Islamophobia. Pakistani terrorists would behead Daniel Pearl, and liberals would accuse conservatives of hostility to freedom of the press. Terrorists in Iraq would behead Nicholas Berg, and his father would blame the President. Insurgents would kill Casey Sheehan, and Cindy Sheehan would accuse George Bush of murder. How sweet it is!

Carson finally proceeds to a bold, but not altogether implausible, prediction.

I predict that as the “war on terror” drags on, as it will regardless of what happens in Iraq, the left in America will come ever more to resemble foreign jihadists, to the extent even of carrying out suicide bombings and maybe even beheadings. Frustration with the failure of their message to bring about political change, combined with blind hatred of the existing order will be the trigger, just as it was for the Symbionese Liberation Army and other brutal left wing groups of a few decades earlier.

The London Times is reporting that a Belgian woman, who had married a Morrocan and converted to “the religion of Peace,” travelled to Iraq and last month blew herself up in a suicidal act of terrorism.

MIREILLE, who was born in Belgium to a white, middle-class Christian family, blew herself to pieces last month in a suicide attack against American troops near Baghdad.

In one of the most extraordinary tales of Islamic radicalisation, she is thought to be the first white Western woman to carry out a suicide bombing.

Belgian investigators, who arrested 14 people associated with her, are keeping the 38-year-old woman’s true identity secret, but details have started to emerge. She was from the southern Belgian town of Charleroi, married to a Moroccan and converted to an extreme form of Islam.

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Expatica

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

— actual source unknown, generally attributed to George Orwell

Charles Krauthammer has a thoughtful article in The Weekly Standard, which constitutes an unusual contribution to the debates within the American commentariat on terrorist interrogation by virtue of saying sensible things. I found the article being chewed over, like a rubber dog toy tossed to a pack of terriers, by a consistery of conservatives on NRO.

I believe myself that attempting to have a publicly-discussed, publicly-disclosed policy of what happens to terrorists is a fundamental and profound mistake.

It is also my opinion that members of the American intelligentsia, a pampered lot, whose personal experience of violence, by and large, tends to have been confined to a certain number of viewings of the films of Quentin Tarrantino, whose worst experience of physical suffering inflicted by another human being took place in a dental chair, the kinds of people who believe there need to be rules about this sort of thing and theories about that sort of thing, are just not qualified to sit in safety and comfort in offices and studies in the United States, telling rough men, charged with maintaining their safety, how to do their job.

The American intelligentsia should simply be grateful that their society includes men who can do for them what they could not possibly do for themselves, shut up, and let it go at that. There are always things which happen in the course of wars which it is better not to think about, better not to talk about. That’s what war is.

The Guardian reports in tomorrow’s edition:

Lawrence Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to secretary of state Colin Powell from 2002 to 2005, singled out Mr Cheney in a wide-ranging political assault on the BBC’s Today programme.

Mr Wilkerson said that in an internal administration debate over whether to abide by the Geneva conventions in the treatment of detainees, Mr Cheney led the argument “that essentially wanted to do away with all restrictions”. Asked whether the vice-president was guilty of a war crime, Mr Wilkerson replied: “Well, that’s an interesting question – it was certainly a domestic crime to advocate terror and I would suspect that it is … an international crime as well.”

Colonel Wilkerson has been unleashing a series of attacks on the administration in recent weeks, making the same kinds of arguments made by known and acknowledged members of the VIPS cabal of State Department and Intelligence Community doves operating in opposition to the current administration since well before the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

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